Brian Carrigan’s clever circuit board business card has Brian’s contact info printed on the PCB and his resume and the project’s source code on the flash chip.

A business card should represent a person’s expertise. My expertise is in creating unique circuit boards, so to celebrate this I wanted to create a USB thumb drive circuit that contains my resume and contact information. This was also a great way to experience coding for USB applications using the Cortex M series of microcontrollers. As a side note, I have done other projects with Cortex M including a simple serial relay and a USB keyboard emulator, but this is the first one that is exciting enough to write about.

While I wouldn’t want to use the final product as my main USB stick, it does exactly what it was meant to do- hold and transfer a small amount of data. The whopping 1MB of storage (maybe I should’ve just used a floppy drive?) allows for enough room to store my resume, a link to my site, as well as the source code for the whole project.

Hmmmm… what’s up with the extra jumper added on after the board was created? If he’s selling his design skills, that’s kind of like leaving a typo covered in wite-out on your resume, isn’t it?

Keith Neufeld

The article indicates that the extra wire corrects an error in the first batch that he has already fixed for the second batch. So it’s kind of like printing out your résumé to proofread it and printing a corrected copy to mail out.

http://www.facebook.com/mike.neary.338 Mike Neary

I’ve seen enough smt jumpers- labled “000” – on commercial circuit boards to know that even professionals sometimes use jumpers. Doesn’t bother me a bit. In fact, I agree with Merglyn…Way cool!

Merglyn

Practical? No.
Awesome? Hell yeah.

m3

Why using a whole extra USB connector? It is just a square of plastic with 4 metal pads on it with and a huge metal casing that messes up with the rest of the design. I think that dropping the whole conector in favor of “T” shaped board with 4 metal pads at that bottom part of the T would make it even more awesome. We’ve seen this done neatly on the install USB drive for OS X Lion… See the picture http://goo.gl/8PkqV

Poet

Just a thought. If the whole unit could have stayed in the size constraint of a business card, the USB connector may have been within the boarder of that size. Thickness and lack of finish with the potential employer or client ripping a pocket liner on solder connections could be a distraction.